I saw it on the Internet so it MUST be true!

The internet is a new technology to many people. A lot of them do not understand how easy it is for false information to be packaged convincingly. When encouraged to do so, they will spread such stories far and wide only to find out later they were untrue. In the past they have been known as Urban Legends.
There are a couple of key phrases that usually mark such a story. One would be “This is not a Hoax!” and the other would be, "send this to everyone you know" (or words to that effect.)

There is another class of internet creature which came from the world of Postal mail.
The Chain letter.
You will not have bad luck if you fail to forward a Chain letter on to at least 9 of your friends.
Many people’s reactions, when they first learn they’ve been fooled is anger.
“Why would somebody do this?”
Hoaxing is an ancient form of entertainment. It’s probably been going on even before the origin of language itself. What’s different now is that due to the internet, a given hoax can spread at the speed of light to literally millions of people.

I selected a unique part of the text, in other words, some text unlikely to be found in any other document, a person’s name or a peculiar and copied it to the clipboard.

Went to the Hoaxbuster’s site, which is one of my “Favorites”: http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/ (or) www.snopes.com

Asked for a “Search” and pasted in the contents of the clipboard into the search field, hit enter

In many cases, this will give you the answer. Other times it won’t. It may be due to your choice of text, choose a different part of the message and search for that. Or go to other Hoax websites and search on those. If you don’t find it at all, this doesn’t prove it’s not a hoax, only that it’s not a known hoax. Run the search for the same text on Google or Yahoo to see if it leads you to the original article.